Sophos on Wednesday identified an Instagram clone that appears to be made by Russian cybercriminals. The post warns that if you download Instagram from sites other than Google Play you run the risk of downloading malware, which will send background SMS texts from your Android device.
The post doesn't explain how the criminals make money from the texts, but a popular scam is to send such messages to premium numbers which incur charges on a user's account.
One way to identify if you've downloaded the app is to look for the following photo:
According to Sophos, several versions of that picture appear inside the app's .APK file. "Maybe the reason why his picture is included multiple times is to change the fingerprint of the .APK in the hope that rudimentary anti-virus scanners might be fooled into not recognising the malicious package," the author, Graham Cluley, a technology consultant at Sophos, speculates.
An updated version of the post notes that several readers have identified the image as a Russian meme. Here is the full version of the photo:
